April 25, 2012

52/54 Review: “Flag on the Play”

When thinking of review, I began to think again try to connect the directive through something that interested me. I wanted to think of something that had to do with sports. Review is very important in professional sports, there is a lot of money and emotion in the game and it is extremely important to always make the correct call. Sometimes certain plays are just to close to call and officials and referees make the wrong call. Most sports have some type of review system in the game. The sport that came most to my mind was the NFL. The NFL has “Instant Replay” in which they review different close calls in order to make the right call. In the sport coaches are given 2 “challenges” throughout the game in which they believe the referee made an incorrect call. The process of “Challenging” begins when the coach gets word from the coaches booth that the play was close enough that they think the referee made the wrong call. The next step for the coach is to take out a red challenge flag and throw it onto the field before the begining of the next play. When the referees see the red flag they stop play and head to the review booth to watch the play over and over again until they can determine the correct call. It is usually very important to get the right call on reviewed plays because they usually come at very significant times in the game.

The red flags used by coaches are just like the yellow penalty flags most sports fans can identify. It is sand in a soft tissue like cloth that is able to be thrown and noticed. The sand is in a little sack at the end of the tissue, and it looks extremely similar to the ghosts that people make out of kleenex. I thought it would be a great idea to make a red challenge review flags that are symbolic of the ones used in the NFL. To create my red challenge flag I first took a kleenex and colored it with a red sharpie. I tried to paint one red initially but that was a mess and did not work. Second I took some of those scented balls and put them in the middle on the uncolored side. I then took a rubber band and sealed the balls in there just as sand would be used in an NFL flag. It was a pretty simple plan but took a pretty good amount of time to do because of the tissue tearing at times. The review flag is a very important part of an NFL game and I believe the one I created could be used as a substitute with the same effect which shows how kleenex can truly relate. If there was a big enough difference between the one I created with kleenex and an acutal challenge flag they would not be able to use mine in a game but I believe they could.